I’ve been worrying about this since they announced that the craft was carbon fiber composite. The stuff has great tensile strength, but very little compressive or sheer strength, no ductility, and no plasticity.

Wow, looks like the vehicle was unflyable after the engine failed. The pilot who survived was lucky to get out. I wonder if the propellent mix was changed to get a higher specific impulse?

Edit: capsules are safer than space planes. An apollo stack would have had a better chance of survival in both space shuttle accidents. If your engine blows up, you still have a working vehicle to land with.

When a uniformed member of the astronaut corps dies in an anomoly, I feel a certain patriotic swell, but this guy died… for tourism! No matter how you puff it up, spaceship one isn’t going to get useful gear out of the gravity well.

It’s a good thing for all of us that private pilots are still allowed to risk their lives for whatever reasons… but I’m not standing up for the space postnational anthem right now.

Everything is nontrivial. Vostok, Mercury, Voskhod, Gemini, Apollo, and Soyuz had all flown without crews before anyone would risk any crews, though other problems would still cost seven lives in Apollo and Soyuz.

Buran was able to fly and land unmanned, fully automatically. And that was 1988, and Russian to boot. The history of unmanned flight reaches back to before WW1. Note the 1946 use of eight remote-controlled B-17s for collecting samples during atomic bomb tests.